Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (21 page)

This time, Heleen tried to orient him. “Do you see Broad Peak?” she asked.

“Of course I see Broad Peak,” Wilco fumed. Why was she asking about the view? He was too unhinged to realize the significance of the question. Only climbers on the Pakistan side of K2 can see Broad Peak.

A few minutes later, Wilco hung up. The call reminded him of another he’d made four years earlier, and the memory buoyed him. From the summit of Everest in 2004, he had dialed Heleen and, shouting above the wind, asked her to marry him. Even then, Heleen had tried to orient him. “Just forget about this,” she had said. “Get down safely. Then we can talk about it.” That’s probably how she felt now, Wilco realized. She wanted him to focus on climbing and survive so their toddler might have a father.

Each step was punishing on his frostbitten feet. The thirst was just as severe. As the day wore on, he wondered whether a swan dive was the solution. Everything looked milky, and he had no idea where he’d land, but a leap of faith seemed simple, even sensible—he’d certainly get down at breakneck speed. What remained of his reason fought against this idea. “If I landed in a crevasse,” he considered, “nobody would ever find me.”

Lights floated around him, burst apart, and dissolved. Deep in his pack, the Thuraya remained on, losing its charge. The sky darkened, and he readied himself for a second night in the Death Zone.

As he traversed toward a rock outcropping, Wilco spotted something yellow—another mountaineer—and climbed toward him. This man, Wilco was sure, had to be real. He was huddled in a sun-bleached parka, and a rope led from his harness to another man, who seemed asleep on his belly.

Wilco introduced himself, but the strangers, long frozen, had nothing to say. Wilco wondered how long they’d been waiting for him. Lonely and lost, he stomped out a pit in the snow and sat out the night in the company of the dead.

13

Buried in the Sky

Snow Dome to Bottleneck

O
nce they had warmed their muscles, Marco and Ger rose from their perches and started down the mountain after Wilco.
Around 8 a.m.
, they too encountered the three desperate men tangled in ropes. Marco couldn’t tell whether they were alive until he noticed their shallow breathing. The sight was surreal, he recalled. “Maybe it was useless. Maybe they would die anyway, but we couldn’t abandon them.”

The slope was slick, and he and Ger moved like crabs. First, they tried to revive the men. Marco noticed that Jumik had lost a boot, so he took off his glove and pulled it over Jumik’s exposed foot. Rooting through Jumik’s pack, he found an oxygen cylinder, but the regulator was missing, making it useless. In the snow, Marco discovered a radio with live batteries. He called several frequencies for help. Someone answered. Marco asked for backup, and, in response, he heard a few words punctuated by static.

Ger, meanwhile, approached Jumik and raised his head to help him breathe. Then he tried to rotate the hanging man above him. “They were like puppets on a string,” Marco recalled. One would straighten and another would bend back. To help get the man upright, Marco wedged a ski pole under his armpit.

Sometime
after 9:58 a.m.
, Ger turned and, without a word, climbed up the slope. Marco shouted after him, using his messianic nickname: “ ‘Jesus,’ I cried. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ No answer. He didn’t even turn around. . . . Nothing. He continued toward the top of the serac.”

Marco continued with the rescue effort. He hammered his axe into the snow and attached the fixed line, creating a backup anchor so the chain of climbers wouldn’t slide. He spent more time trying to free them—maybe an hour, but the passage of time was hard to calculate—and eventually he could do no more. He left. With only a ski pole for balance, he climbed along the Traverse and descended into the Bottleneck without an axe. “I clawed down by my fingernails,” he recalled.

By the time he made it through the Bottleneck, Marco could barely walk. After that, he crawled, “moving with his hands and legs like a horse,” recalled Tsering Bhote, who encountered Marco below the Bottleneck. “He had his buttocks up in the air. Sometimes, he slipped and crawled with the help of his hands.”

Tsering and Big Pasang offered Marco oxygen. Gesturing, Marco indicated that he would never touch the stuff. Before he continued down, the Italian took a chocolate bar from his jacket and handed it to Big Pasang. “It was
nice of him, but weird
,” Tsering recalled.

As Marco crawled toward the Shoulder, his mind, like his body, began to fail. The Death Zone does that to everyone. Scientists suspect it’s the lower pressure that makes blood vessels leak, causing the brain to swell. Brain cells receive less oxygen and short-circuit. Neurons misfire. Climbers see and hear things. Marco heard
an avalanche roar
. A man wearing yellow La Sportiva boots surfed past him. Before he lost consciousness, Marco saw the man’s blue eye pop from its socket. It rolled into his palm like a gumball, and Marco was certain it belonged to Ger.

Ger kept his eyes and his wits. At Camp 4, two digital cameras were zoomed in on the upper slopes. Although observers couldn’t see his rescue effort by naked eye, their memory cards capture some of what happened.

Evidence suggests that Jumik was freed. A photo
taken at 9:58 a.m.
shows a figure in a lime downsuit—Marco—and another in a red downsuit—Ger—working on the ropes binding Jumik. Another photo taken later shows the ropes, but
Jumik is gone
. Two eyewitnesses, Tsering and Big Pasang, spotted him near the Bottleneck around 3 p.m., and a
photo from 3:10 p.m.
shows Jumik, dead, below the Bottleneck.

Jumik couldn’t have slid out of the rope tangle and down to the location where his body was found; he would have had to traverse 300 yards to get even near that trajectory. And Jumik was too entangled to have
rescued himself
. Clearly, Ger, the only able-bodied person in the vicinity after Marco left, helped him. Here’s how it could have been done.

Sometime after about 9:58 a.m., Ger lumbered up the 50-degree slope, leaving Marco and the three tangled men below. Ger probably couldn’t hear Marco shouting at him. Snow muffles sound; down hoods block it. Ger, according to Marco, continued up without turning around, climbing in the direction of the anchor point of the fixed line.

The upward slog would have been long, perhaps a hundred yards, and, given Ger’s condition, might have taken him an hour. At least one ice screw had been gouged out by the falling serac, and Ger went up high enough to disappear from Marco’s view. Trudging up the mountain, Ger would have paused to pressure-breathe, resting every few steps.

Many rescue techniques require a climber to reach the anchor point of the rope, and Ger had practiced rescues of this kind in the mountains of Alaska. Once at the anchor point, he would have studied the ice screw to assess how well it was holding. Depending on what he saw, he might have jammed it deeper into the ice, the goal being to establish a stable rope system that releases tension on the main line.

Unlike rescues dramatized by Hollywood, actual mountain rescues are slow-paced, technical affairs that prioritize risk management over speed. They commonly involve tying a complex series of knots. Ger’s hands would have been clumsy from the cold as he tied and retied knots he knew by rote.

Matt Szundy, founder of the Ascending Path guide service in Alaska, taught and tested Ger on rescue techniques. He speculated that Ger “rigged a secondary anchor near the first, using an ice screw in his pack.” Then, using a Prusik hitch and a Munter hitch, Ger would have created a series of pulleylike knots and loops that, thanks to friction and leverage, provided some slack and a strong backup anchor so that when he freed the tangled men, their bodies wouldn’t go
sledding down
the mountain.

After creating the rope system, Ger descended toward the men. Now that he had enough slack to work with, he would have begun untying the climbers and equipping the people he freed. Jumik was missing a boot. Ger might have yanked a boot off another man and given it to him. Photos suggest Jumik was eventually worked free and able to stand.

Ger could do nothing for the man at the top of the tangle. He couldn’t be revived, according to Marco and Wilco, the last living witnesses to see him. A grainy photo taken at 7:16 p.m. shows his body splayed in the same orientation as it appears in the morning photos.

But Ger may have rescued the man in the middle of the knot. The evidence is inconclusive. In the three grainy photographs of the rescue site—taken at 8:06 a.m., 9:58 a.m., and 7:16 p.m.—the man’s position appears unchanged. But
two eyewitnesses
believe they saw him that afternoon with Jumik and Ger on the Traverse. Perhaps the shape in some of the photos is something other than a body, such as a pile of discarded rope.

Although the Korean was injured and weak, it is possible that he revived enough to climb. Mountaineers have gone from comatose to ambulatory under similar circumstances, as Texas mountaineer Beck Weathers did in 1996. Beck was in the upper reaches of Everest when a blizzard engulfed him in 80-mile-an-hour winds. His friends had left him in a hypothermic coma, assuming he would never wake. But, sometime the next morning, Beck opened his eyes, struggled to his feet, and began climbing toward camp. “I am neither churchly nor a particularly spiritual person,” he later wrote, “but I can tell you that some force within me rejected death at the last moment and then guided me, blind and stumbling—quite literally a
dead man walking
.” The Korean was injured and Jumik’s foot was severely frostbitten, frozen to the ankle, but the two men may have felt the same way that Weathers had as they climbed up to the Traverse with Ger.

Somewhere along the way, a fourth man joined them, according to Big Pasang’s radio calls. Who was he? It’s hard to rule out a third Korean who hadn’t been seen since the night before, but it is also possible the man was Pakistani high-altitude porter Karim Meherban. Photos suggest that Karim, after spending the night alone in the cold, slid down the crown of the serac, self-arrested, and managed to retrace his steps to the junction at the Snow Dome. There he could have met Jumik, Ger, and the Korean climber before they reached the Bottleneck.

Whoever they were—Jumik and Ger were among them, but it’s impossible to identify the others with any certainty—
four men
were hobbling along the Traverse, driven by a force that rejects death.

After accepting Marco’s chocolate bar, the Bhote cousins resumed climbing toward the Bottleneck in search of survivors. By 3 p.m., Big Pasang had pulled ahead of Tsering by 900 feet. He looked up ahead and jubilantly
reported on the radio
what he saw: “Jumik is alive,” he exclaimed, “and behind him are three men in red downsuits.” He couldn’t tell who they were.

Stowing the radio, Big Pasang may have waved and shouted at the men coming toward him and must have been overcome with relief. As Big Pasang approached the climbers, he may have heard a crack as an ice block fell. It bludgeoned one man—probably Ger, based on Big Pasang’s description on the radio—and knocked him off the Traverse. “One man in a red suit with black patches was hit by falling ice,” Big Pasang shouted over the radio to Pemba Gyalje and Tsering. “Now there are only three men descending.”

Big Pasang probably tried to pick up the pace, eager to lead the three survivors out of the fall zone. Jumik was in front, so Big Pasang would have reached him first. Maybe the cousins embraced. Perhaps Big Pasang offered him some of the contents of his pack: water, bottled oxygen, and juice. He definitely attached Jumik to a rope.

As the two other climbers in red suits approached him, Big Pasang might have yelled up, reassuring them. All his effort was in vain. A
thunderous boom
ricocheted off the mountain.

Contrary to legend, you can’t start an avalanche by yelling or yodeling, but almost anything that deforms the snow can set one off: falling rocks, melting ice, rain, hail, an earthquake, a footstep. In nine out of ten cases, victims trigger the avalanche that kills them.

Avalanches can take various forms—ice, loose powder, heavy wet snow, rock and glacial flows—but the terrain the climbers traversed on the morning of August 2 was ripe for a dry-slab avalanche. Climbers on the mountain reported that each time they stepped on the snow, they heard a distinctive creak, and cracks shot across the snow’s surface. They were climbing down a slope of about 40 degrees, an angle well within the 25- to 45-degree range that’s common with dry slabs. Snow had been piling up for weeks, and the temperature had spiked over the previous few days, helping loosen layers of snow.

Skilled climbers will notice these danger signs, but predicting avalanches is imprecise even with the most sophisticated equipment. The chances of a flow depend on the snow’s stickiness, the size and density of the ice crystals, how well those crystals are bonded, the steepness of the slope, the shape of the terrain, the temperature, the humidity, the location and force of the trigger. In broad terms, a slab avalanche occurs when a top layer of snow slips over a lower layer. Anything that makes the space between the two layers more slick (such as watery or ball-bearing ice crystals), or anything that adds pressure on the top layer (such as more snow) increases the likelihood of an avalanche.